> Early on in the process of building SETT, I decided that we had to actually help people get more subscribers and more comments. If we could prove that we could do that, I figured we'd be successful. If not, we had a lot more work to do.

This would make an interesting case study. How did community engagement improve? What were the most important factors? Could this also happened due to other events etc.? If you can clearly trace it back to the introduction and benefits of SETT, that's a perfect marketing instrument.

> but I wanted to make sure they were paying for something that represented what I was hoping to build.

I started my business "by accident". I ran it as a side project for years while I was studying. It was always far from the vision of the perfect product that I had in my head. Then, graduation day came closer, I was making maybe 400€ a month off ads and was thinking:"How can I ever get to the vision I have in my head without making any real money off this website, if I'm going to have a regular 43-hour-week job in a few months? Impossible."

I had already a lot of users and a friend of mine said:"Look, you've got a product, you've got users. They use your website every day. Forget the vision in your head for now and start to charge some money. It's the only option available to you. Start charging 1€ a month. That's a no-brainer for the people. They'll stick."

Tynan, you have my utmost respect for your dedication and your hard work. However, ultimately, the only metric for your success won't be your faith, but how many people will give you actual money for the product.

You've got your first dozen paying customers and some people would say that this is enough as a business/market evaluation. Congrats for that achievement!

Investing two years in a product without having a single paying customer has quite some risk and cost attached to it. I'm not sure if I'd do it. Not only is there the cost of "missed opportunity to make cash otherwise" but also the possibility that not enough people will buy, which might be the worst case. Some people are paying, but not enough to be sustainable. This would be different if you invested only a couple hundred hours and see if you can make a few bucks of it. But a couple thousand hours?

With that investment comes also a huge emotional investment. You made sacrifices throughout the two years and with that there's an increase of the feeling that "It HAS to work - otherwise, I'm crushed deeply". But I guess from what I've learned about you from your blog post, this is exactly the way you wanted it. High risk, hopefully high reward. Sort of extreme.

Anyways, I wish you all the best with SETT!